Temple Dragon Band In Amsterdam - High Times Cannabis Cup

THE TEMPLE DRAGON BAND
AMSTERDAM, 2012.
 

Fly By Night 248: Do It

Demands to the University of Amsterdam Executive Board (ReThink UVA)

PERSBERICHT EN EISEN IN HET NEDERLANDS
Rethink UvA – Moving Forward

Demands to the University of Amsterdam Executive Board
4 March, 2015
At present, ever more decisions are taken at the UvA by managers who are removed from the concerns and needs of students and staff, and do not answer to them for those decisions. Without assuming there is one template that fits each and every program, department, institute, or faculty, we call for the democratization and decentralization of the UvA’s governance structure, in order to allow the academic community to govern itself honestly and responsibly.
While we embark on a thorough discussion of how best to meet this goal, we demand:

1. An immediate moratorium on restructuring processes, negotiations and sale of UvA property, and institutional mergers;
2. That the CvB immediately agrees to initiate a detailed proposal on how it intends to facilitate a democratization of the UvA and restore the relations of trust it has undermined, or else resign from their posts;
3. To initiate a full investigation by an independent committee of the university’s financial policies and current state of affairs.

These are preconditions for, not a consequence of, a university-wide discussion, which must result in the implementation of the following processes:

4. Shifting the weight of a quantitative, output-based financial model to qualitative forms of evaluation, including peer and student review;
5. Fostering a genuine academic environment where research and teaching are combined, and countering the present tendency to split these activities into a two-tier system that rewards the former at the expense of the latter;
6. Defining equitable workloads in teaching, research, and administration, and creating visible and accessible paths to career development for temporary and permanent staff alike.

We call on the CvB to accept our demands for immediate actions (nos. 1-3) and agree unequivocally on the longer-term goals of the university (nos. 4-6) within two days, that is, until Friday 6 March, 2015, at 4pm. Otherwise, we will escalate our struggle, including but not limited to walk-outs, teach-ins, symbolic actions, petitions, occupation of UvA buildings and facilities, performances, gatherings, and strikes.

http://rethinkuva.nl/2015/03/04/letter-to-uva-executive-board/

360 Panorama of Tropen Museum

Tropen museum main hall in Amsterdam

The tale of the 'high' tribe

The tale of the tribe

High Time and the Counter-cultural hall of fame.

"A ganachakra (Sanskrit: gaṇacakra, or 'gathering circle'; Tibetan: tshogs kyi 'khor lo) is also known as tsog, ganapuja, chakrapuja or ganachakrapuja. It is a generic term for various tantric assemblies or feasts, in which practitioners meet to chant mantra, enact mudra, make votive offerings and practice various tantric rituals as part of a sadhana, or spiritual practice. The ganachakra often comprises a sacramental meal and festivities such as dancing; the feast generally consisting of materials that were considered forbidden or taboo in medieval India, where the tantric movement arose. As a tantric practice, forms of ganachakra are practiced today in both Hinduism, Bön and Vajrayana Buddhism. --TSOG

I like the idea of the Counter-cultural Hall of Fame, as developed by High Times and Steven Hager, and I’m happy that the legendary characters from America’s exulted tradition of counter-cultural revolutionaries, artists, poets, musicians and humanitarian activists in the fullest sense of that term: revolutionary. High Times magazine seem to have developed a good selection process for the Hall Of Fame and the Celebrity Cup judges, besides all the weed, the poetry and scholar activism blooms.

In his essay - T.A.Z - from the book TSOG: The thing that ate the constitution. Robert Anton Wilson writes about being picked to be a celebrity judge for the High Times Cannabis Cup in 1999 and his experiences in Amsterdam. I read this essay again recently and found all sorts of cross links and descriptions of the Cannabis Cup and Amsterdam that I find irresistible to share.

1. T.A.Z or Temporary Autonomous Zone invokes Peter Lamorn Wilson, another brilliant bearded anarchist 'scholar activist philosopher' of the American tradition, who RAW often criss-crosses paths with when musing upon cultural revolution. Peter Lamborn Wilson’s TAZ seems to be used here as the title of Bob’s essay [see excerpt below] to help describe the unique red-light and coffeeshop Zones of Dutch tolerance here in Amsterdam, and some other parts of the Netherlands, and a generally intelligent and exemplary model.

2. William S. Burroughs was inducted into the High Times Hall of Fame in 1999, and RAW participated in the induction ceremony by reading parts from NOVA EXPRESS, a small clip of this event can be found on you tune in a video compiled based on the induction of the Beat generation into the High Times Countercultural Hall Of Fame. It was Burroughs who turned Wilson onto the 23 enigma' and Wilson compared WSB with James Joyce as the two greatest literary entities of the 20th century.

3. The name Simon Vinkenoog was familiar to me by way of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, like so many things; who noted Simon’s work in his books, such as the tale of the Sage of Dalkey in his last published work – email to the Universe. When I arrived in Amsterdam Simon was active and a strong part of the Dutch resistance to Bullshit, mediocrity and Tsarist Occupation Government. Simon passed onwards into outer-hyperspace July 12th, 2009. Simon was recently featured upon John’s 10 show holiday extravaganza, and for me this fact makes yet another loop between American and European counter-cultural anthropology, bound together by John’s choice of musical artefacts, that continue to delight the air-waves.

4. The current editor in Chief of High Times and Grand Wizard of the Cannabis Cup – Steven Hager – wrote a book called ‘The Octopus Conspiracy’ that for me, brings together much of the work and playful confidence found in RAW’s occasional work with the High Times Magazine. This book helps one enter the process of engaging in counter-cultural information theory, in my humble opinion – the art of social historicism on the furtive cusp of Conspiracy Theory. I’m not going into the area of conspiracy research with this article, but instead I choose to honour research. This may also be translated as independent journalism - thinking for yourself and following your sense for truth and knowledge - no matter which rabbit hole your tricky senses may lead.

The following excerpt brings together James Joyce, Ezra Pound, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and John Sinclair into an Amsterdam synchro-mesh that seems a perfect example of RAW's hologramic prose' - in which every part contains the whole - here we have the Moderns, the Beats, the Post-Moderns, and, the sense of ambiguity that has haunted the 20th century, all in a paragraph that could equally be in resonance with "the tale of the tribe'.

Temporary Autonomous Zone, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution. by Robert Anton Wilson, [excerpt]

“John Sinclair started talking about his days with the MC-5, a great Rock group of the 1960’s. My brain did a quantum jump and reorganized the whole world. This was not the John Sinclair I once knew, who wrote a brilliant column for the Village Voice. No wonder he didn’t look like ‘himself’: he wasn’t ‘himself’ at all. He wa the other John Sinclair, from Detriot, who founded the White Panther Party and served a few years in prison for generously giving a joint to an undercover narc. (Under Michigan law at that time, giving somebody a good high for free was punished with the same imprisonment as selling it.) I had mixed up two different John Sinclair's. I felt relieved. Mixing all that fucking pot hadn’t fucked up my fucking brain after all. They led me to the stage. (Was it the same day or another day?) I was giving a speech, inducting William S. Burroughs into the Cannabis Hall of Fame. I told them reasons I consider Burroughs the greatest writer since Joyce, but they seemed restless, so I quoted them a bit of unpublished Burroughs:

“A coprophile named Scott
Who lived in Aldershot
Said, “I’m unbeatable-
My shit is eatable!
Perpetual motion I’ve got.

”I went into a flashback...... November 1968, at the Playboy Club in Chicago, having lunch with Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. We had been Demonstarting against the War all week, but now we were enjoying a pleasant meal, and Allen was telling us about his recent meeting with Crazy Uncle Ezra Pound in Rapollo. He had told Ez he considered the Cantos the greatest poem of the 20th Century, and Ez said, “But it is all vitiated by that stupid, suburban anti-semitism.”
“Suburban,” Burroughs repeated, considering the connotations of the word; I was more fascinated by “vitiated.”
I snapped back to Amsterdam. – Robert Anton Wilson, Temporary Autonomous Zone, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution.

"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications—Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?" - Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus Trilogy, page 78.

“Robert Anton Wilson learns about the significance of the number 23 from William Burroughs:

William Burroughs introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was still at Playboy. I had said, on first seeing the unpublished manuscript of Naked Lunch in 1956, This man is the greatest prose writer since James Joyce. (I am still rather proud of being the first to make that comparison) I did not meet Burroughs until 1966, and found Bill a more charming and ordinary individual than his books suggest - one had been prepared for a mad genius and found instead a rather prosaic, almost academic, quite gentlemanly genius. His story of the 23 mystery went like this... In the early 60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that hed been running the ferry 23 years without incident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody on board. In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Easter Airlines plane on the new York-Miami, and the flight was listed as Flight 23. Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in many of them.

Sean Halligan tells distant cousin Peter that he has heard that expression somewhere before, in a dream he recalls. It was a dream reported by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. He had written about the dream in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections, strangely enough, on page 223: -- http://www.poee.org/living/GetPage.aspx?ID=180

Adamsterham letters: Pound and Joyce.

Adamsterham letters: Pound and Joyce.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and the Cantos of Ezra Pound are examples of a single artists global perspective of humanity, and the language of the humanity tribe.

Both books are important for any NEW Word Order between different cultures, their hierarchy of values and a new unified foundation upon which these differences can be accommodated, shared and mixed into the diversity of world humanity. The multicultural and co-operative open societies we must learn to cohabit.

Both psycho-somatically and geo-politically, open-source-flow of LANGUAGE processing and communications are critical for a healthy co-operative open society.  F.W and the Cantos pry open the barrels of world language and give us our “Tale of the Tribe”; a tale of humanity – warts and all - that dislocates and relocates history into a new language of truth beauty and meaning beyond the linear - Aristotelian based - alphabetic cipher.

In particular, Finnegans Wake and the Cantos introduced by Dr. Robert Anton Wilson in his book COINCIDANCE--amidst C.G Jung, physicist David Bohm and the usual tribe of colourful characters whom RAW invokes using his own special species of writing--he presents evidence, which i now interpret to suggest that “Finnegans Wake” in particular, and Pound’s “Cantos” behave as special kinds of writing – Tales of the tribe? – that somehow increase the synchronistic experiences of those who come into contact with them - almost as if spooky entities are invoked by reading and/or speaking words aloud.

A spooky kind of intelligence seems to live in the poetry itself, a time-traveling entity here to inhabit the non-locally perceived space-time manifold of human observers, to the degree that they are paying attention to the text and to their own surroundings. The two flip polarity and the narrator is suddenly describing the present, as the individual observer perceives it, probably due to the effects of hologramic prose’ i guess, which can seem spooky and wonderful at the same time. Deja Vu’?

Both books are striking to me as a total revision of the English language, of which i am a native speaker - and both came as a shock to what i perceive to be familiar texts, poems, histories, novels and literature up until that point.

The books seemed totally alien to me at first, impossibly complex like a crossword fortress of foreign symbols & esoteric syntax; all fucked up words, beyond recognition etc,. But with the help of a reading group and some fantastic teachers, a search engines i came to decipher some of the text, or i became confident in sharing my rather wild observations about what i was reading based largely on the locally interactive method by which such “world encyclopedias” operate. Synchronicity strikes.

I feel that the sense of weird synchronicity increases when one is interacting with any such specially attenuated--world epic-encyclopedic (Tale of the Tribe)--and the method by which one creates such a work, is by no means something you learn in school. More in the tradition of music, it seems to me that the creation of such masterpieces that radiate a magical quality of--spooky action at a distance--are successful as works of art and poetry, so powerful and universal are the themes and language deployed that they can be overwhelming in their precise and personal way of interacting with the individual and the tribe. Masterpieces within the ancient Hermetic tradition.

Unlike most religious texts and socially binding contracts these unique poems charged up with a global language reflect the story of his-story, as told and/or annotated by one author. A single unified individual who serves as the scribe of the tribe, the one who puts down what really happened, the one who invents a whole new style and develops a whole new language that aims to include all humanity and the biosphere under its parasol.

The artists provoke and poke you and pull your coat tails, trying to get you to see and read again, making you think and even forcing the reader to expand their linguistic palate if they really want to “know” something about the book and the world within which it breathes. Who, when, why, how, where are difficult to locate at first, you have to almost just read blind at first, like a kind of braille reading but without any prior experience with reading braille.

You have to feel and breathe with these texts and then, i bet you, if you just continue something will jump off the page and begin YOUR particular reading, an illuminated detail, an epiphany and a synchronicity will follow if you pay attention and keep an open mind. The rewards from reading in this way and from reading both these books in combination with internet search engines and vast document archives, and, if you can dig it, writings of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson, you have a platform,an axis, a foundation for tackling the alphapocalypse of culture and language that i perceive to be moments away, and in synchrony with the singularity i call timewave 6012.

I propose that the new global and multicultural perspectives and daily interactions with such encyclopedias of humanitas’ increase the likely-hood of experiencing the synchronicity phenomena in your life i guess. A strange statement, but this reflects my own experiences with these two texts, not just Dr. Wilson's Joyce/Pound synchromesh; and i feel that with the added resource of global internet i can present some of my findings and add a little to the field of Joyce and Pound scholarship within the great lineage of Dr. Robert Anton Wilson. A new beginning.

You can read about my encounters with Finnegans Wake and Cantos in my other blog posts, and the following is meant to be an update and further glossing of the two books based on my current physical location in Amsterdam, NL.

John Adams is a major figure within Pound’s Cantos, and this is why both Stourbridge and Amsterdam appear in the Cantos – John Adams visit to Europe during the 1780’s during which time he encountered the banking and trade chiefs of Holland and England, among other countries and wrote things about florins, Pounds, Guilders; who distributes them and how. Pound weaves writing of American presidents together, writing and thoughts critically compared, all about Europe, empire, commerce, war and banking. All with Chinese equivalences, Persian equivalences, Roman, Greek, German and Egyptian equivalences, all dancing together on the page, wrestling to make sense of the world at war, world commerce, world empire and a world language flexible yet precise enough to contain it all in a single text by a single author.